The Truth about Hate Crimes Laws

The Truth about Hate Crimes Laws

Article excerpt

For whatever reasons, it took the death of a young gay white man at the hands of two other young white men in Wyoming to bring the issue of violence aimed at lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people (LGBT) to national consciousness. While one of those young men, Russell Henderson, has pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping and robbery, and while another, Aaron McKinney, awaits trial, national lesbian and gay organizations have focused the fear, anger, compassion and political capital aroused by Matthew Shepard's killing into a campaign for federal and state hate crimes legislation.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians And Gays, along with an assortment of religious, ethnic, feminist and civil rights groups, have all pursued hate crimes legislation. They are joined by President Clinton, most Congressional Democrats and even a few Republicans, such as Senator Arlen Specter, who have endorsed the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA), a version of which failed to pass last year's Congress despite having more than 200 co-sponsors and some bipartisan support.

Hate crimes legislation denotes a set of prescriptions that include toughening sentencing guidelines, expanding federal jurisdiction and requiring the compilation of statistical data on bias crimes. (On the federal level, the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, passed in 1990, already requires the FBI to collect data on anti-LGBT violence.) Currently, twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have hate crimes laws with provisions on sexual orientation along with race, religion, ethnicity and, in some cases, disability and gender; twenty states have hate crimes laws that do not include sexual orientation, and nine states have no hate crimes laws whatsoever.

Even as national lesbian and gay organizations pursue hate crimes laws with single-minded fervor, concentrating precious resources and energy on these campaigns, there is no evidence that such laws actually prevent hate crimes. Passage of the federal HCPA would be largely symbolic: Although it would expand the potential for federal prosecution of anti-LGBT bias crimes, for the most part it would allow legislators to appear to be doing something about homophobia without actually addressing its cultural roots. Meanwhile, beneath the national radar, local antiviolence projects focused on community organizing, outreach and education-efforts that attempt to stop gay- bashing by changing the social environment in which it occurs-are struggling with scant resources.

HRC and other national gay and lesbian organizations contend that if hate crimes laws are passed, law enforcement officials will not only report anti-LGBT violence but will also have the mandate and resources to prosecute it. Yet HRC's political director, Winnie Stachelberg, concedes that "local law enforcement agencies are often reluctant to report [such] crimes," and there is little reason to think that such reluctance would dissolve in the face of a new law. A 1998 report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, a network of community-based organizations that monitor and respond to anti-LGBT violence, notes that instances of verbal harassment and abuse by police officers increased by 155 percent from 1997 to 1998, and reports of physical abuse by police grew by more than 866 percent. …